Agile2011 Final Report

Agile2011 was a great conference. No question. Broad coverage of a bunch of great topics, high quality speakers and great organization made it probably the most enjoyable conference I’ve ever been too. Regardless of what you’re working on – hardware, software, marketing, sales, etc – and irrespective of what role you play in your organization -developer, tester, manager, executive, HR, whatever – and regardless of the type of processes and practices you follow, Agile2011 was a place where anyone could take away ideas that they can take back to work monday morning and begin applying immediately.

If you haven’t read through my daily reports yet, I wrote a daily round-up for each of monday to thursday. I sat in on a bit of the first keynote friday morning but had to leave early to get the airport (so no friday report unfortunately). You can go back to the Agile2011 page for pointers to each days report. I’ll finish off here with my general thoughts of the week.

Upside

Seating people around tables during the talks as opposed to rows had more people talking and sharing ideas. The seating arrangement made for much more memorable sessions than I’m used to.

There was an area called open jam with whiteboards and flip-charts. Anyone could could post an idea for anytime in hopes others interested in the topic would stop by and chat about it. Great idea. The open jam area was always busy. I spent a little time in there myself.

Talks were full of interactive exercises. Again, the audience wasn’t there to just get blasted with information. People were there to collaboration and interact.

If you haven’t visited the Agile2011 program site, you really should. The array of topics was fantastic. There was something for everyone. I think most speakers upload there slides to this site if you’re interested.

Downsides

There was only one downside for me, too many good talks! And they all seemed to be on at the same time!

That’s it for Agile2011. I’ve already started thinking about next years proposal so I hope to see some of you again at Agile2012 in Dallas!

-neil

Share this:

About nosnhojn

I've been working in ASIC and FPGA development for more than 13 years at various IP and product development companies and now as a consultant with XtremeEDA Corp. In 2008 I took an interest in agile software development. I've found a massive amount of material out there related to agile development, all of it is interesting and most of it is applicable to hardware development in one form or another. So I'm here to find what agile concepts will work for hardware development and to help other developers use them successfully.
I've been fortunate to have the chance to speak about agile hardware development at various conferences like Agile2011, Agile2012, Intel Lean/Agile Conference 2013 and SNUG. I also do lunch-n-learn talks for small groups and enjoy talking to anyone with an agile hardware story to tell!
You can find me at neil.johnson@agilesoc.com.